Collective light shifts of many cavity modes probed by an optical frequency comb

Optical cavities can be used to enhance the interaction of light with atoms or molecules. In a regime where cavity resonances are very far from the atomic or molecular transition frequencies, photon absorption can be neglected and the dispersive part of the interaction can induce spectacular phenomena such as squeezing, cooling, and self-organization. So far, this dispersive interaction regime has only been explored using a single or few longitudinal cavity modes at a time. We experimentally study the dispersive interaction between a cold atom cloud and many longitudinal modes of a Fabry-Perot cavity, by detecting collective light shifts in the transmission spectrum of an optical frequency comb probe. Notably, using a high quality resonator coupled to more than 10⁵ intracavity atoms, we detect appreciable shifts of 100 cavity modes simultaneously. These results constitute a direct demonstration of dispersive coupling of matter with many longitudinal modes of a linear resonator, and pave the way towards deeper exploration of atom-light dynamics in the multifrequency domain.